[Daneel_]

"This Friday" is the one during the current week, provided it's currently earlier than Friday. If it's Saturday/Sunday already and I want to talk about the Friday that's only 5 days away I would say "this coming Friday" (or just "Friday").

"Next Friday" is always a week+ away. If it's Tuesday and I say "next Friday", I ALWAYS mean the day 10 days away.

If someone says "next Friday" to me and they mean the one in a few days I'll look at them like they're crazy.

[zippyman55]

This next Friday, I’ll be next to my girl Friday.

[aspenmayer]

What if they say “Friday week”?

[nerdile]

Native US English speaker here, and this is the first time I have ever heard of this. TIL

[aspenmayer]

Every time I hear it, it befuddles me just like the first time. It seems like a syntax error or something. My mind literally reels, like the idea is a fish and I can nearly feel the fishing line drag but the syntax and grammar isn’t rigidly applied, and so I can’t increase the tension or the line will snap, as it isn’t rated for this hefty and impactful of an idea as when something occurs specifically. I don’t know if that fish story adds anything, but I realized that there was some potential for wordplay that helps explain how it feels perceptually to hear these English words in nonstandard order from someone to whom it is standard. It’s strange.

[myself248]

It's like saying "half ten" instead of "ten thirty". There's a missing word, it's "half past ten", it's "friday next week".

[aspenmayer]

How do I know the missing word isn’t [up]coming, as in “Friday (coming [up] (this)) week”? As opposed to next week, which would be “Friday (next) week” in this syntax.

For that matter, the missing word could be this, as in “Friday (this) week” versus “Friday (that (as in the next one after the one contrasted with via the word this) week”. I have no way to disambiguate this, so I ask something like “Friday after tomorrow” or “Friday the 13th” or something. It’s hard being me at times, I’ll admit.

[stolsvik]

In Norwegian that means 9:30. It is indeed very common, that’s how we say every x:30. It’s «halfway to ten» or something.

[Daneel_]

I hear this in the US when people say "a couple things" instead of "a couple of things". The word "of" is missing!

[leipie]

In Dutch the literal translation is "half tien" which means 9:30 in Dutch. This can be quite confusing ;)

[ryx]

In Germany it‘s even more confusing. In the West people say „Viertel nach Neun“ and “Viertel vor Zehn” which is pretty much „quarter past nine“ and “quarter to ten”, while in Eastern Germany people say “Viertel Zehn” and “Dreiviertel Zehn” which rather means “quarter of ten” and “three quarters of ten”. Even though they are meaning exactly the same times.

[antod]

Reasonably commonly used in Commonwealth countries.

Next Friday is sometimes too ambiguous, you can never be sure you share the same definition with the other person. Is it the same as This Friday (the very next occurring Friday), or Friday Week (ie next week's Friday).

[frereubu]

I always thought of "Friday week" as "Friday plus a week" rather than "next week's Friday".

[antod]

yeah, that's a better way of expressing it.

[aspenmayer]

I heard it used this way in Australia, and I’ve heard it now and then in British TV programs. Only have heard it among very old timers in isolated areas in the US a few times when I was very young previously.

[kiwijamo]

Never seen or heard this in New Zealand from native speakers.

[antod]

We must move in different circles then ;)

Maybe I should ask my kids...

[antod]

My kiwi teenage daughter and her friend didn't really use it, but did hear it used occasionally.

Interestingly they both had different definitions of Next Friday though, and both thought there was only one way of defining it.

[jama211]

I’m Australian and I’ve heard this a lot

[Daneel_]

Likewise. I'm Australian and have used it regularly for a long time. My parents have always used it.

[Daneel_]

That always means "two Fridays from now" - so if it's Tuesday, then they mean next Friday.

I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.

[aspenmayer]

What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times? How can you know that they don’t from an isolated utterance? Can you know with reasonable certainty that the person saying it knows what you think they mean?

From context you might know if it seems like they know how to use the phrase, but I always struggle to understand these quirks, perhaps because I heard these terms as an adult and haven’t used them much myself, or been exposed to them and the context enough to immerse myself in the colloquial usage by diffusion.

This is close to weird constructions like “x is deceptively y” like “the dog is deceptively large” which, without already knowing the size of the dog, makes me feel like a dunce because I don’t know while not giving me enough specificity to know if the the largeness is what is deceptive or just the perception of the largeness. It’s a syntactical tarpit.

> I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.

I am a native English (US) speaker, and I think it’s a British English thing perhaps, as I heard it all the time in Australia, along with other week-related terms like fortnight.

[d1sxeyes]

> What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?

Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?

“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.

[aspenmayer]

> > What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?

> Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?

> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.

That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading. It comes naturally to you, it seems, but less so to me, if I can explain.

To me, “Friday coming/this coming Friday” is just as underspecified because it communicates explicitly ambiguously that which is definitively known due to unknown knowns and/or unknown unknowns: you don’t know if I know what day it is today or not, and on days I haven’t been outside yet, I may not know if it’s AM/PM or midnight or noon. I could think I know what day it is and be honestly mistaken, leading me to believe that the next/coming Friday is a day away, as in tomorrow, but miss that it’s already Friday today, making the listener think I mean a week from now, when I mean right now for events taking place on the night of the day in question.

I also think it’s ambiguous what “coming/next Friday” means, because it’s obvious that the one coming up this week is coming up, so it seems too on the nose to refer to it as such, which makes me think that it’s a week from now, but this time, they actually do mean the Friday a few days from now.

[retsibsi]

I think this discussion of "Friday week" has people talking at cross purposes, and there may not be any real disagreement. It's an idiom, and if you're part of a (sub-)culture that has this idiom, its meaning is unambiguous. But if it's unfamiliar to you, you can't be expected to deduce its meaning from first principles.

Someone upthread mentioned "half ten", which is similar: if you're familiar with the idiom, you know it unambiguously means half past ten, but if you're not, you can't be sure that it doesn't mean 9.30 (or, for the literalists among us, 5.00).

Anyone telling you that you're wrong for not understanding it, or that you should start using it even though those around you are unfamiliar with it, is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.

[thaumasiotes]

> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”.

Well, no, the typical case would be that it means nothing at all and the other person thinks you're having a stroke. Zero potential meanings isn't actually better than two potential meanings.

You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".

[retsibsi]

That's just a spicy way of saying "I am unfamiliar with this idiom". Nobody is saying you should unilaterally start using it in the US, or in any other context where nobody would understand you. They're saying that, for those who do have this idiom, it is unambiguous.

[defrost]

I've been using Friday week type constructs for many decades .. never had an issue.

> You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".

Sorry, of which month in which year under what calender?

[Daneel_]

Exactly. "Friday week" is completely clear - there is no ambiguity about which Friday you might mean, and your definition is 100% accurate.

If you're unfamiliar with the phrase then it's likely meaningless, but if you do know then there's no chance of getting it incorrect.

[Macha]

The second Friday from today

[aspenmayer]

> The second Friday from today

What if it’s Friday where you are, but isn’t for me yet? Would that be a week from tomorrow or two weeks from tomorrow, for me or for you?

[Macha]

Luckily

(a) I generally don’t schedule things in the middle of the night

and

(b) it’s well understood amongst my social circles that if you’re for some reason trying to schedule something at the end of a party at 2am Friday then for basically all purposes it’s still Thursday

—-

But also once time zones are involved it’s better to just give a date, time and zone for clarity. That doesn’t mean people need to apply the same to their personal life and use it even where shorthand is unambiguous.

[Daneel_]

I'd go off the timezone of whoever made the statement, but honestly this is where it's better to simply clarify by saying "just checking, that's in 8 days, yeah?" or similar.